Hospitality Company Re-Employs 100+ to Schedule COVID-19 Tests

LOS ANGELES—In response to the New York State Department of Health’s call for help scheduling appointments for residents to receive COVID-19 testing, Tyme Global Technologies, a provider of remote services to hotels in New York, immediately pivoted its business focus from hospitality to healthcare to re-employ, train and fully deploy more than 100 staff members within 48 hours.

“The number of hotels that we worked with has dwindled down; I think we had about 5% left,” said Ryan Levin, CEO, Tyme Global Technologies. “Our partners got together and [we decided]to make drastic changes as fast as possible.”

Through its long-standing partnership with T2 Tech Group, an IT consulting, advisory and project management services provider, Tyme Global was positioned with the technology infrastructure and staffing to begin conducting outbound calls to thousands of New Yorkers to schedule COVID-19 tests.

Levin reached out to his hospitality clients to find the people who could make those calls. “We can take the remote workforce that we have sitting at home after all being furloughed and help out in different sectors in different industries as best we can,” he said. “We can take these experts that we have trained over the years and start using them elsewhere. We reached out to all the contacts we had made and thankfully we had one get back literally begging for urgent help needed and they gave us a few operators, and then they gave us a few more operators and then even more.”

It came to a point where they had more positions open to make the appointments than available workers from its clients. They turned to T2 Tech to fill those positions.

“T2 had been working in hospitals across the country for the last 15 years providing technology services,” said Kevin Torf, managing partner, T2 Tech Group. “We work very closely with a lot of the hospital’s call centers, which help scheduling patients and revenue cycle management for what they call collections and claim processes. These people are very familiar with working with patients on the telephone and coordinating activities. A lot of them also have been furloughed because a lot of elective surgeries and elective healthcare has dwindled. The people in the hospital are the COVID-19 patients. Many of these call centers are running about 30% capacity from their normal. There are a lot of people out there—thousands, potentially—that we are tapping into and those are the individuals I was able to get Ryan. We are on a path right now to look for a couple hundred more in California, so this is something where we can put people to work in a different manner, in a different setting.”

The team has made 105,000 calls (an average of 7,000 per day) and estimates that it has set up around 24,000 to 30,000 appointments thus far.

While the first deployment of this new remote call team is focused on New York, Tyme Global and T2 Tech are poised and ready to help industries, state and local governments, hotels and hospitals across the country with remote turnkey services, secure technology infrastructure, and access to experienced and available remote employees, working from the safety of their homes now and as virtual workforces continue to evolve moving forward.

Some of Tyme Global’s hotel clients have converted their premises to house healthcare workers, quarantined patients and even overloaded hospital beds. As a further step in assisting with the pandemic, the company’s operators also manage these hotels’ call traffic to assist internal and external people with any information and assistance needed.

Current Issue

Hotel Business Editor-in-Chief Christina Trauthwein shares some of the highlights of the May 15th issue, including a cover story on COVID-19 and the law, the annual sources of funding report and list, and a piece on streaming content in hotels’ public spaces.